


Grit

by earlybloomingparentheses



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: M/M, Victorian, Victorian gay club, Victorian sexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-12
Updated: 2013-07-12
Packaged: 2017-12-19 07:05:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/880861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlybloomingparentheses/pseuds/earlybloomingparentheses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson, still bruised and damaged from the Afghan War, decides to hide his inversion so Sherlock Holmes will remain his friend and flatmate. He thinks the trade-off won't be difficult, but in a moment of weakness he goes to an underground club with an erstwhile lover. What he discovers there is more than he'd bargained for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grit

In a little-known side street in a particular neighborhood of London, there is a club—one of perhaps a dozen like it in the city—where gentlemen of certain proclivities may congregate freely and openly, as they can nowhere else. To enter for the first time, you must be accompanied by someone who is known to the man at the door; after all, it is impossible to be too careful in such matters. I made my inaugural visit some seven or eight years previous to the events of this narrative, on the arm of a man named Lucien White, a former barrister whose attentions to me were short-lived but pleasant and who now resides, if my information is still current, in a disreputable quarter of Paris with a boy some fifteen years his junior who makes him astoundingly happy. The club quickly became a favorite of mine, although it had been two and a half years since I’d set foot in it, due first to a prolonged dalliance that started well and ended very badly, when I announced my intention to join up as an army doctor, and then to my time in Afghanistan. Upon my return to England I knew I was too wrecked for any man to truly want me, and I stayed away from those of my kind so that even if by some miracle they found my browned and shrunken frame tolerable enough to wish to sleep with me, I would never have to see the look of disgust when they removed my shirt to find my shoulder a torn and twisted lump of flesh.

There was also another reason that I kept to myself. I had found a flatmate—the story is known well enough now, I daresay—and Sherlock Holmes took away my loneliness and self-pity simply by having no time or patience for them. I began to help him with his cases (though I have no illusions that I provided him with much real assistance), and to my great surprise the cold, imperious, brilliant, capricious man I took him for at first glance—a marble statue, glorious but entirely out of my reach—warmed to me, ever so slightly, bit by bit. For the first time since my return I dared to hope that I had a friend. And since I wanted to keep that friend, and since that friend could deduce literally every detail of my movements from observing my knees and elbows and the debris on my cuffs, I knew that I must take special care if I were to have a hope of keeping my nature secret from him. So I thought it best to renounce the practice of it altogether. He was very vocally celibate; I might be, too, and I imagined we could live happily together in easy bachelorhood.

I held out for some four months. The shame I felt at my scarred body helped suppress my natural urges, and while any one of my new friend’s qualities—his brilliance, his sharp dry wit, his hieratic face and quietly powerful limbs, his fierce need (hidden even from himself) to right the wrongs of the world—might have caused me to fall irrevocably under his spell, taken together, they combined to create a sort of invisible shield around him: he was like a god, untouchable, to be admired from afar but never desired in the way one desires mere mortals; or like a perfect machine, a graceful automaton whose well-oiled parts never wore down. It may seem that I prevaricate, but I assure you, I felt myself much too battered, too wounded, too ordinary, for the likes of him.

But my desires returned nonetheless. I marveled at Holmes’s ability to suppress his need for companionship, deciding it must be another aspect of that genius which set him apart from the rest of us. I missed the easy physicality of life in the army; here in London, it was much more dangerous and difficult to find a partner for a night of casual pleasure. By the end of four months I was aching for human touch.

 

So it was that when I ran across Oliver Carrington, an occasional lover of mine whom I had last seen some three years before, when he was twenty and beautiful and alight with the vigor of youth, I was not so reticent as I had once resolved to be. We bumped into each other, quite literally, outside Little’s, a secondhand bookshop, and I saw with great and almost guilty relief that despite the changes time had wrought upon me, he recognized me immediately.

“If it isn’t old Watson!” he said, his big blue eyes widening with pleasure. He had not altered, except perhaps to grow a little firmer around the edges, sure of himself where he had not been before. I tried and failed not to notice the sinuous curve of his long neck.

“I _am_ old,” I said, keeping my tone light despite the private awareness that what I said was true. I lowered my eyelashes just a fraction. “It is a wonder that you even knew me.”

Flirting came shockingly easy after eschewing it for so long. Carrington—whose given name I had uttered breathlessly as his hand moved between my naked thighs, a fact I am sure was not far from either of our minds—smiled and propped his elbow against the cart of books I had been perusing, effectively trapping me within the circle of his limbs. “Don’t be coy, Watson. You’re thirty if you’re a day.”

I nearly winced and stepped away. I was barely twenty-nine. But somehow this handsome, healthy boy who had known me intimately before the war still wanted to flirt with me, however diminished I was, so I kept on.

“And yet in my old age I seem to have fallen out of touch with the people and places of my youth,” I said sadly. My eyes flicked to his broad, handsome face, which looked amused and, underneath the surface, unquestionably hungry. I studied my fingers, pretending at regret. “The old club, for example. I haven’t been there in years.”

His eyes flashed with eager pleasure, as I had hoped they would. “Well, we must rectify the situation. By all means.” Both of us glanced around automatically, discreetly, without turning our heads. He lowered his voice, so the elderly woman just inside the door of the shop could not hear. “Tonight, half past nine, at the old meeting place?”

I nodded, and the familiar rush of excitement and anticipation came to me once more, a sensation I had never experienced in any other circumstance: the feeling that something had been consummated already, that some illicit and dangerous thing had occurred there in broad daylight, the awareness of it filling my veins with white-hot electricity and my mouth with a faint copper taste like blood. As we said our goodbyes I allowed my eyes to travel deliberately down his waistcoat and settle at the just-visible bulge between his legs, which began to stir delicately before I met his gaze once more.

“You’re a wicked one, Watson,” he said softly, and then he was gone.

It was only as I turned back towards Baker Street that my euphoria ebbed abruptly away and the face of Sherlock Holmes materialized in my mind. _He will know,_ I thought with a sinking heart. _Oh, John Watson, what have you done?_

On my unhappy walk home I reflected on how shocked my new, my only, friend would be if he could have heard the conversation that had just passed between Oliver Carrington and myself. I was confident—relatively so, at any rate—that Holmes was both rational and iconoclastic enough to not particularly care what two consenting males got up to behind closed doors. I did not think he would turn me over to the police. But Holmes hated emotion, had said so often enough; he hated all that was feminine, too, and I knew the flirtatious demeanor I had adopted with Carrington would repulse him. I do not see why such a thing should be considered unmasculine—Carrington and I are both men; that is after all the point, is it not?—but nonetheless it is, and the coquettish, eyelash-fluttering fellow I had just become would have shocked and appalled anyone, Holmes above all, who knew me only as the manly doctor-turned-soldier. I knew that the two sides of me—one strong, firm, upright, the other effeminate and unmistakably queer—seemed anathema to each other, and yet, I thought rather petulantly as I walked past clattering carriages and the great oblivious crowds of London, both of them belonged to me.

But that was the problem, I reflected, scuffing my foot against the paving stones. Holmes would deduce, by some miracle of shirtsleeves and shoes, exactly what had occurred outside the bookshop and, therefore, would discover the part of me I seemed miraculously to have kept hidden from him until now. And he would know that it was as much an element of John Watson as my doctoring and soldiering; and he would hate me for it. From then on I would be a liability and a weakness and a walking symbol of all that repelled him.

When I reached 221B I stared up at the window of our sitting room, discerning his wiry frame silhouetted through the glass, and wished with all my heart that I did not have to face him. But there was nothing to be done. The longer I was away, the more there would be for him to read on my person when I returned. So I arranged my face into the most innocuous expression I could, and mounted our seventeen steps.

“Ah, Watson,” he said crisply as I entered. “Nothing of interest at Little’s, I see.”

My heart stilled horribly (I had not told him I was going to the bookshop), and I replaced my coat on its peg with trembling fingers. But he said nothing further, and after a moment I risked a glance at him. His head was buried once more in his newspaper.

“No,” I said, hardly daring to speak. “Nothing of interest.”

“Always pleasant to run into an old friend, though.” He turned the page.

I froze. But nothing more came.

“Yes,” I said cautiously.

He made a vague noise and then, as he is wont to do, seemed to retreat from the room, his attention concentrating elsewhere. I stood watching him for a moment, baffled and afraid, then shook myself and made a quick exit to my bedchamber.

I sat on the edge of my bed, staring at the floor, as if my eyes could bore a hole in it through which I could view the confounding consulting detective who sat just below. But after a moment, I laughed aloud, once, then stifled the noise with my sleeve.

I had simply been paranoid, I thought. Too long under the same roof as Sherlock Holmes and I began to think he truly was a machine. He could not literally see my every move. Still, it had been a close escape. A chance encounter with a former lover was one thing; a visit to a club filled with those of my kind was quite another. It would be far too dangerous to go tonight. Regretfully, I made a silent apology to Oliver Carrington for standing him up. He would be all right, I reasoned. He could do far better than me as it was. And I simply could not go.

 

I went anyway. Whatever willpower and stamina I had possessed when I was shot and carried a hundred miles across the desert on a donkey, feverish and delirious and in more pain than I ever thought was possible, had apparently dissipated after four sexless months in London. After I retired to my bedchamber that afternoon, I fell asleep, and I am ashamed to say that I woke up sticky and flushed, like a frustrated youth. My dream had been both vague and graphic, visions of Carrington, naked and eager, melting into the giant, scowling face of Sherlock Holmes. I knew that his riding-crop had figured prominently, a fact which made my ears grow red with embarrassment as I cleaned the mess from my body and slipped into fresh trousers. I sat for some time with my head in my hands, then proceeded downstairs, hoping that perhaps a new case had come up, one that would take my mind off its current obsession.

He was not there. In those early days especially, Sherlock Homes was prone to going out unannounced, often at odd hours, presumably on the trail of some case whose particulars I might or might not be privy to later on. When he left in the evening he often stayed out all night. I stared at his armchair, empty and shadowed beside the last glowing embers of the fire, and felt a spark of hope in my chest.

 _I could go and come back and he would never even know,_ I thought, glancing at the clock in the corner, which read a quarter to nine. _I could change my clothes when I return, draw a bath, remove all traces of the evening from my person._ The image of the club, warm and golden and seductive, swam before my eyes, and the thought of Carrington’s hands on my neglected body sent tremors of anticipation skittering across my skin. _It’s just tonight. Just the once._

Before I could stop myself, I seized my coat and hurried out of the flat.

 

We met at the gate of a small square—it doesn’t matter which one—and proceeded down winding alleyways on a route my feet remembered well. The buildings around us were dark, full of offices empty at this time of night, and we hurried down a narrow staircase to the small black door of the club.

Carrington knocked three times quickly, then paused, then gave another knock, and the door swung open to reveal the large bald head of Peterson, the old doorkeeper. He nodded pleasantly at my companion and then did a double take when he saw me.

“Good heavens, if it isn’t John Watson!” he said, ushering us into the long corridor. “I haven’t seen you in—oh, three years now? My, how you’ve changed, sir!”

I tried to keep the bitterness out of my smile. “I knew you were lying to me, Carrington. He says I’ve changed.”

Peterson laughed. “Well, well. But I thought you’d found yourself a fellow! What was his name—Thompson—Travers—”

“It didn’t work out,” I said shortly. Perhaps it had been a mistake coming back here, I thought as Carrington and I handed Peterson our coats. All it could do was remind me how inaccessible my old life was now, a faded photograph of a time now so long gone it seemed to have belonged to someone else.

“Ah, well,” Peterson said. I knew he had seen the dissolution of more partnerships than he could remember over all his years here; it is hard for two men to stay true to each other when they must also hide from the rest of the world. I sighed, feeling my enthusiasm for the night begin to drain away.

Carrington must have sensed my melancholy, for he caught me by the arm as Peterson opened the door into the dining room, his tone determinedly jovial as he said, “Lucky for me it didn’t, though, eh?”

“Lucky indeed, sir,” Peterson said respectfully, and then we were inside, and I forgot to be sad.

The room was just as I had remembered it. Small round tables, candles flickering cheerfully, were crowded in the corners, well-groomed waiters serving the men who sat at them holding hands and drinking elegantly from clear crystal glasses. A violin and a cello played a slow waltz (a full quartet would have been too loud) as couples danced, arms around each others’ waists. I had forgotten what heaven it was, to be with others of my kind. In the army we had kept things quick and discreet, fumbled embraces under cover of darkness, and the reminder that it was possible, even if only here, to openly embrace the man you loved or fancied or merely desired for an evening of companionship warmed me like a strong drink. I looked at Carrington, unspeakably grateful to him for bringing me, and he smiled back, touching me gently on the cheek.

“Sit,” he said, “I’ll get us drinks.”

I chose a table in the corner, fingering the white tablecloth with something like wonder, and closed my eyes, taking in the low rumble of masculine voices. I was going to have a damned good night, I resolved. He and I would drink and dance and then we would retire to one of the club’s private rooms and then…

I do not know what made me open my eyes at that moment. But when I did, I found myself gazing across the room, at a table in the opposite corner, where, sitting alone, was Sherlock Holmes.

My stomach dropped dizzyingly. Incoherent thoughts flashed through my mind. _He found me out. He followed me here._ Panic rose up, dimming my sight. _But then how did he get inside?_ my brain asked hazily. _He is on a case,_ I guessed, mind racing. _He is here with someone—a suspect—or he is here for the police…_ I admit with shame that for a terrified moment I believed that to be true: that he was a spy, that he was going to give the club away, that at any moment there was to be a raid—

And then one of the waiters (Frederick, my mind supplied helpfully) came over to him, and exchanged a few words—a few flirtatious words, by the look of it—and placed his hand gently on the small of Holmes’s back before gliding away. Holmes smiled faintly after him. Then, slowly, his eyes began to wander around the room, lingering on the men who sat alone.

He saw me the moment after it struck me that I ought to run. Before I had time even to stand, his eyes met mine. They widened in shock and then his face grew utterly blank. We stared at each other, the room seeming to narrow to the space between us, and after a long pause he inclined his head very slightly to the seat across from him.

“Ah, watch out, sorry!” laughed Carrington as he returned, nearly slopping wine over the edges of the glasses he carried. “It’s crowded in here tonight!”

He pushed my drink toward me and then slid his hand affectionately into the crook of my neck, squeezing gently. “It’s good to see you again, John.”

Involuntarily, I drew away from his touch. He frowned, puzzlement creasing his broad forehead. “I’m sorry,” I said hastily.

“Are you all right?” He looked concerned. “You’ve gone quite pale.”

I let out a strangled sound between a no and a yes. I could not look at Sherlock Holmes. What was he thinking right now? What must his face look like as he watched this lissome young man put his hands on my skin?

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I—I’ve just seen a, an old acquaintance. I’m afraid I have to—I have to, er, speak with him, I…”

“Is it Geoffrey Thomas?” Carrington asked immediately, his brow darkening as he scanned the room. “John, you mustn’t see him again, I know he wasn’t good to you in the end—”

“It isn’t Geoffrey.”

He looked back at me, confused—heaven knows what my face was doing; I felt like my head was about to explode or float away—and slowly his features drooped.

“Oh,” he said quietly. He sounded hurt. “It’s all right, Watson, I won’t force you into anything. You can go if you like.”

“No,” I said, rubbing my face desperately in my hands. “I mean—it’s—he’s a friend. He didn’t know…I didn’t know…” I gestured helplessly to the room.

Some flicker of understanding crossed Carrington’s face, and for a second he looked older than his years. All of us know more than we would like about navigating friendships with those who don’t know, can’t know, our secret. We know about confidences withheld, and accidental hurts caused and given, and we know what it is to dread the moment we are found out.

Oliver Carrington placed his hand briefly around my clenched fist, a gesture of sympathy that in that moment I found immeasurably moving.

“I’m sorry to leave you,” I said honestly, still unable to look back in the direction of my friend—was he still gazing at me? Or had he looked away? What if he had left? I tried to smile at Carrington, but I knew it came out as a grimace. “You’ll be all right. Tonight you ought to be with somebody younger and less damaged than I, at any rate.”

He caught my sleeve as I stood and pulled me fiercely in. “Don’t you dare say that about yourself, John Watson.” His blue eyes bored into mine. “Don’t you dare think yourself not good enough for this man, whoever he is, and if he thinks that of you he isn’t worth the dirt on your shoes.”

Too stunned to protest at these extraordinary words, I stumbled away from the table and turned, finally, to look back at Sherlock Holmes. He was still sitting in the corner, his eyes fixed on me. They pulled me magnetically towards him, and before I knew I had crossed the room, I was taking the chair beside him.

I cleared my throat nervously. “Holmes,” I began.

“You have been here scores of times,” he said rapidly, cutting me off, “but not for several years now. You came tonight because of a chance encounter, probably this afternoon at Little’s bookshop, with that man you were sitting with. He is some six years your junior, from a wealthy family, orphaned as a teenager, has one large dog, and takes his coffee with sugar, no cream, and you have been intimate with him on a number of occasions, though your relationship was never serious, as is also the case with three other men in this room. You believe yourself too changed by the war for him to find you attractive, a notion which is manifestly untrue, both on his part and on the part of your previous suitors, all of whom have noted your return with interest. You felt unsure about coming tonight, but when you arrived you relaxed considerably. That is, of course, until you saw me.”

My mind was churning. “So you did know I was to be here!” I burst out. “You knew—you knew all along that I—that I…”

Holmes’s face contracted in an odd kind of spasm and he slammed his fist down on the table, causing the silverware to clatter. I jumped, frightened.

“I did _not_ know,” he hissed. “I did not know you were to be here tonight, I did not know the true nature of your chance meeting this afternoon, and I certainly did not know until several minutes ago that you share my peculiar proclivities.” He looked positively furious. “I should have deduced it, why on earth didn’t I deduce it?”

But I was caught on one thought—the revelation he had just let drop like an unwanted piece of scrap paper. “ _Your_ proclivities?”

He met my eye, briefly, and gave a curt nod. “Of course. Why else would I be here?”

I shook my head. My world was spinning. I thought hazily of his protestations against emotion, against love. Had they been merely a blind, then, like those the rest of us put up to hide our true natures? Was Sherlock Holmes not truly a perfect cerebral machine, but merely a secret homosexual?

“Watson.” I looked back at him, trying to reconcile my new knowledge with the hawk-faced man who sat before me. “Watson.”

“Yes?”

“Why didn’t I _know?_ ”

“I am sorry I did not tell you, Holmes,” I replied haltingly, “but surely you know what it is like—”

“No, no.” He waved my words away impatiently. “Of course you did not tell me. Why did I not _deduce_ it?”

I shook my head. I was as baffled as him on that front. “Do not be so hard on yourself, Holmes, I did not guess it of you either—”

He laughed. “Oh, my dear Watson. Of course you did not. Even if I did not take great pains to conceal it thoroughly, do you truly believe you would have observed the crucial but tiny details that would have told it to you?”

“I am not as blind as all that,” I replied, stung despite my continuing state of shock. “I know, for instance, that you are a frequent but relatively recent visitor here—”

“Because you have not seen me here before, so I must have started coming within the last few years, and you know my visits are frequent because of my familiarity with the waiters,” he interrupted, eyebrows raised in amusement.

“—and that you tip generously,” I finished.

He looked startled. “How on earth did you know that?”

I managed a smile. “Certainly not based on your behavior at other establishments.” I nodded in the direction of the waiter who had served him before. “Frederick only flirts with the generous tippers.”

Holmes burst out laughing. “My dear Watson. You are a marvel.”

I smiled, more easily this time, feeling the old familiar glow of Holmes’s praise. For a moment we were back in Baker Street, discussing a case beside the fire. I might have reached out to light his pipe, my fingers brushing his companionably.

The mirth drained from his face abruptly as we both remembered where we were. “But why didn’t I _know_ ,” he muttered yet again, and fell into a deep silence.

I stared at the tablecloth, listening to the wheels turn in his head, and wondered where we went now. It was as if some great cataclysm had occurred. Everything I knew seemed upside-down, everything familiar suddenly strange. And yet…surely this was good? Surely this was better than I could ever have hoped? He would not throw me out; he would not despise me. And more than that, we could be true friends now, open and honest with each other, no shadow of a secret to come between us. I thought of us sitting over the supper table, discussing the stately nose or the shapely hands of some male client, and my chest expanded with warmth. Full of hope and happiness, I lifted my eyes to meet his, just as he was turning his to meet mine.

“Grit,” he whispered as he stared at me. “Grit in a sensitive instrument.”

He looked devastated. It took me a long moment to understand what he was saying. And then I remembered.

 _It is such a pity,_ he had said one cold morning, after a client who had just learned her husband had been sleeping with the maidservant for ten years had broken down in a fit of hysterics on our sitting-room floor, _it is such a pity that people must succumb to the softer emotions. It clouds their judgment so. Love, Watson, is like grit in a sensitive instrument. Thank heaven I am immune to it, or my deductive powers would be severely diminished. And then where would we be?_ He had laughed, and I had laughed too, taking refuge in his determined celibacy, still believing I could follow his example. Now I stared at him, stricken, as he looked at me with the most intense despair I have ever seen on his face, before or since.

I tripped up the gears inside his magnificent head. I made it impossible for him to see clearly. And seeing clearly was what he valued above all else.

“Holmes,” I said, and I knew that I would have to go, and I knew that losing him was far, far worse even than I had dreamed it would be.

His name on my lips startled him back into awareness. He took in my eyes, brimming with tears, and a puzzled look stole across his face, the despair vanishing in a heartbeat.

“I am your grit,” I whispered.

“Oh, Watson,” he said breathlessly, and then it was like a ray of sunshine had burst forth across his sharp face. “Yes. Yes, you are.” He beamed. He beamed, and he took my hand.

“I didn’t know that, either,” he said, and his slender fingers were impossibly warm between my own. “Most of all I didn’t know that.”

Gently, tentatively, he brought my hand up to his mouth. The brush of his dry lips against my knuckles was like the first breath of cool air on my face when I awoke in the army hospital, my fever broken at last. It was a sensation I had not known I was missing.

“Holmes,” I murmured, as the last traces of his godlike distance fell away and he sat before me, a man, flawed, human, with grit in his gears just like the rest of us. I could love this man, I thought, and the idea brought a smile bubbling once more to my face.

“Watson,” he said delightedly, “I have a proposition for you.”

He said it with the same relish I heard in his voice whenever he announced that we had a new case. The same eager anticipation rose up in me to meet it.

“Of course, my dear fellow,” I said, grinning. “I am open to anything.”

“In that case,” he said, sliding his elbows across the table so our noses nearly met, “I would like to buy you dinner.” He dropped his voice so only I could hear, and he lowered his eyelashes with playful seductiveness. “And then I should very much like to take you home.”

“Yes, please,” I murmured back, and kissed him.


End file.
